12-Pack Review: NWA WS 06/30/01

BEER ONE: It’s a super hot summer Sunday in the South, which means I rode up to the store at the end of the road this morning and go me a jug of tomato juice, preferably made with fresh tomatoes, oddly enough which is usually the shitty generic brands like Our Family and Red-Glo, instead of the from concentrate crap that most companies pas off on you. Throw that in the fridge and let it chill, to that little opening thing with the end of a can opener you never use, and pour a little in each beer for proper bodily vegetation while doing another damned 12-Pack review. Tonight, I’ve got NWA Wildside and their Freedom Fight 2001. The intro is heavily metaled out, which is a good sign. And they have cheesy production values, and immediately, out comes a young A.J. Styles, probably still driving a Honda Civic hatchback in these days, with his pals Onyx and Air Paris. In my humble opinion, Air Paris is the shit. He looks like the type of guy who would date one of my younger sisters and have me buy him a bottle of vodka and try to convince me how fuckin’ genius Yngwie Malmsteen was. I’m thinking these guys are heels because they’re baseball caps are backwards. You know, if you don’t drink all the tomato juice in the can and you put it in the fridge, I heard you can get aluminum poisoning or some shit, so if you’re a kid at home and trying to drink up all the beer with tomato juice you can, make sure you don’t get yourself aluminum poisoning. Hey, I like this Jeff G. Bailey, because he has the creepy recovering alcoholic in his late thirties facial features that all good heel attorney/managers should have in wrestling. Too many people in wrestling nowadays look clean and polished. Your face is a roadmap to your life, and lots of these guys have fresh interstate faces that haven’t had to sleep in shitty Regal Inns where Mexican crackheads might or might not be breaking into your car outside off roads that used to be America’s lifeblood but now have abandoned factories and bright buildings with signs that say “CHECKS CASHED”. And strip mall churches. Strip mall churches are a sure sign a town has gone to shit. The most you can hope for at a strip mall church is that once in a while, George South or the Italian Stallion will bring some form of Christian wrestling to the parking lot, and they’ll have free Pepsi and hot dogs. Even that is hard to digest, as Christian wrestling wastes all the potential Biblical conflicts it could bring to life, and instead just has a bunch of Christian wrestlers play heels and faces with goofy pro-God trunks on. Shouldn’t a heel hate God, especially in a Christian wrestling ring? Wildside gets mixed reviews. Some say it’s the fuckin’ shit, and others call it overrated. I have never been disappointed by them, but most of what I saw was when they were sucking on the sweet tit of WCW as a developmental territory. IT’S JACEY NORTH! Along with some other guy. Jacey North rocks, and it’s nice to actually watch him wrassle somebody other than Preston Quinn in a flea market or some shit. The first time I saw North was in the VWF Training Academy, which was a garage in an industrial complex, and North got clocked in the baldhead with a cane. He came out to watch the last match with a cold can of Lipton Iced Tea on his bruised brain. That, to me, is what indy wrestling is all about. Jacey and the other guy are going up against White Trash and another guy. Lance Dreamer is North’s partner, and White Trash looks as dumb as a fuckin’ brick, legit. Jacey is a great staller, a lost art amongst today’s heels. Not wanting to actually engage in battle and avoiding it for seven minutes will make a crowd hate you more than a million thumbs to the eyes. White Trash is perhaps the sloppiest wrestler I have ever seen on a videotape. Tank is the other guy with White Trash, and unfortunately, White Trash is back in the ring. Jacey North dives off the top rope, gets caught by Tank and White Trash and flipped over their head onto some fat chicks in the first row. Again, that’s indy. Tank drops an ugly elbow off the apron to the outside.

BEER TWO: Now, the shitty guys used a stop sign to smash Jacey North, then they got the pin. I hate matches that have hardcore rules that don’t make it clearly obvious they’re hardcore by having all sorts of chair and table action. All of a sudden, this shitty little wrestler grabs a stop sign the ref allows it and I’m confused. Oh well. Total Destruction, Sean Royal & Rusty Riddle, come out, and look fresh from Atlanta’s finest strip clubs. Their opponents are Kent and Keith, the Kohl Brothers, managed by the recovering alcoholic I mentioned earlier. Did I mention this is for the Wildside tag titles? Well, it is. I like Rusty Riddle and Sean Royal; they look the guys that The Undertaker might hang with outside of work and steal all their style for his shitty mainstream version. Thus, The Undertaker just acts like a bad ass and does his stupid ride-the-motorcycle thing in all the time, with his slut wife back home fuckin’ seven other guys and he’s got her name tattooed on his fuckin’ esophagus, while Riddle & Royal are legitimately being bad asses, beating some poor dude down with pool sticks for bumping the jukebox while “Simple Man” was playing. Royal gets thrown into the guardrail at the same spot that Jacey North was the match before, directly right of the ring from the main camera angle, just like Championship Wrestling from Florida used to do. How many times did poor Barry Windham get tossed through that one piece of wood? I think Rusty Riddle is my new favorite wrestler, purely on style. The Kohl brothers suck, and are very lethargic when it comes to anything. They can’t even put a decent kick to the back of Royal. I guess Rusty Riddle is a poor man’s Undertaker, but guess what, I’m poor. Wow, Riddle sucks in the ring though. They did the ol’ faces hit finishing maneuver, then bad manager distracts both one face and the ref, so that other heel can clock somebody with a chair and drape his partner’s lifeless arm over top the other guy to win the match. If I’ve seen it once, I’ve seen it a million times. Shit, they cut off Riddle’s braided ponytail. That is wack as fuck. A man who braids his ponytail is a good man. Well, the stylish guy who strolled in with bad tattoos and a braided ponytail got the full lucha treatment and his head shaved, mostly. “Rusty Riddle is actually very proud of that hair that he had, because most of his friends didn’t have any.” A thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters for a thousand years could never write something so wonderful.

BEER THREE: Blackout, the next tag team, comes out to “Come Clean” by Jeru the Damaja. That beat tweaked me back in the day, sounding like Chinese water torture. We used to freestyle over that track constantly. Me and my boy Boogie Brown even sampled that “control the mic like Fidel Castro” for a song called “Mic Control”. Blackout is Homicide and Rainman, and they are my favorites. Wildside is a promotion after my heart through the intangibles. The giant crazy uncleness of Rusty Riddle, followed by “Come Clean”. I will drink some fuckin’ beer. Blackout’s competition is Tony Stradlin & Todd Sexton, aka TNT. They’ve got that baggy pants, rapid fire style that was so favorable amongst pre-teen girls three years ago. All these guys are competent enough, but you can tell they’re young, at least relative to wrestling experience. They have the basics covered, but they just lack that certain something to put them over the top. Charisma, je ne se quais, the cherry on top, whatever. The white guys won, of course. According to the goofy announcer, it’s time for Infernal Damnation.

BEER FOUR: The odd thing about this match is that David Young & Rick Michaels, aka Bad Attitude, were NWA World tag team champs at the time. However, Young was teaming with a Terry Knight, and Michaels was with Scottie Wrenn, on opposing sides. I’m not sure what all this Infernal Damnation talk is about, but they are teasing fire, and I saw Steve Martin, Mr. Wildside, your heel manager of this one, holding two brand new bottles of rubbing alcohol, just like we use at work to wipe down prints after they’ve been laminated. Of course, this makes me think I should try to blow a fireball at work tomorrow, just to see what happens. Sure, you should be trained, but who the fuck is gonna train me to blow fire. The Sheik is seven states away. David Young hits an awkward moonsault to the outside. Scottie Wrenn, who is not small, does a sick flip to the outside. Rick Michaels, following the program, has to go up and do a dive off the corner rope. David Young takes a chairshot, and lays there, to blade himself. Let’s see what he comes up with…a minor gusher. They’ve got a table on fire. Michaels was gonna throw Young onto it, but they stopped it, so now the table is just sitting there burning. A guy with a fire extinguisher comes and puts it out. Now smoke and mist is everywhere. This rocks. Three of these guys are not wearing shirts, so if this is a flaming tables match, I can guess that Scottie Wrenn will lose. Just like playing Clue. The great thing is, this match is pure carnage, but honest carnage, and there’s some six-year-old in the front row taking pictures. I love America. Now, Michaels sets another table up with lighter fluid. Terry Knight knocks him out, and lights the table. Michaels with the nutshot. Wow, that table is fuckin’ on fire. They’re teasing a bare back fall into the table. Umm, that table is really on fire, a lot. Terry Knight puts Rick Michaels’ face in the fire. Yes, you read that correctly. There’s a guy ringside to help with the fire wearing big fat gloves and safety goggles. Now, Michaels and Knight have gone in the ring, and Wrenn and Young are outside. Young does a brainbuster through the table, which is no longer on fire, and slips on wet stuff on the ground. Everybody is getting hurt. It’s great seeing shit like this with no regulars like Sabu or Ian Rotten or Mad Man Pondo or Onita or Funk.

BEER FIVE: You always read some pussy saying they shouldn’t use burning tables in wrestling because you can’t control it and you could get hurt, but I say, “fuck you pussy.” A guy getting into this knows that to be fact, and if he’s still down, then god bless him. I can relate. Life ain’t so peaches and cream for all of us. Sometimes you gotta get some aggression out, and rather than pistol whipping some motherfucker at a stoplight for looking at us funny when the electricity just got cut off and our mom is sleeping with another woman and dad quit the seventh step of AA to go through a fifth of Jim Beam a day for the last week and it’s only a matter of time before he’s broke again and drinking cheap vodka from the plastic gallon jugs instead of Beam, which at least has the semblance of success, being it’s expensive, rather than breaking down, we release all that tension. We write hateful shit and shoot guns all day long and get involved in flaming table matches, so that we can be more positive, relative to our mental condition. If you can’t get with that, fuck off, and don’t watch it. Go look at your pseudo-sports contests between guys that I hardly can tell the difference from each other with all sorts of weird named maneuvers that I can’t pronounce. Keep your believable defense and stiff offense. I want two motherfuckers who seem like they hate each other trying to smash each other into fire. The great thing is, in the NCW Arena, they’re setting these tables on fire like two feet from children. The whole place could go up. Rick Michaels is pointing up somewhere and going to bad places. David Young is on a table at the entrance, and Michaels falls from somewhere. Now, Scottie Wrenn and Terry Knight are in the ring, with Wrenn on the top turnbuckle. Mr. Wildside Steve Martin comes and sets a table that is in the middle of the ring on fire. Knights goes up to superplex Wrenn, who pushes off, and Knight goes through the table. HOLY SHIT! He rolls out the ring, with his back on fire. It is on fire for like ten seconds or so, the announcer yelling, “ROLL! ROLL!” even though Knight is the heel. The guy with the goggles and the fire extinguisher puts Terry Knight’s back out. But now the ring is on fire, so they put that out, too. Terry Knight was not the guy with the t-shirt on, so his bare fuckin’ back was on fire. I imagine that he’s pretty fucked up after this show, and probably pretty pissed about that moment to this day. Or, he’s bragging about it. One or the other. It’s hard to tell with fucked-up Southerners. A battery blows up in their face and they lose an eye, and two years later, they’ll pop the glass bitch out, drop it in your cousin’s Sprite and make jokes about car batteries.

BEER SIX: There’s all sorts of run-ins and storyline chicanery going on. I’m still pretty amazed at that guy’s back being on fire. The ring has broken tables and blood stains and dust from the fire extinguishers and all sorts of shit going on. Caprice Coleman, who is down with Blackout, probably because in pro wrestling, all black guys must work together, comes down with a ladder. His opponent is Jimmy Rave, also with a ladder. So we have a ladder match between that dude who was dating my sister and getting me to buy him bottles of Absolut against a smallish black dude, who is “afraid of heights”, according to the announcer. That’s great, a ladder match with a guy who’s afraid of heights. Talk about being a heel. Some old white guy with glasses tells all the other black dudes who are not Caprice Coleman they have to leave the ringside area. The Little Debbie filled white bellies ringside wave their arms and do that “sha na na na, sha na na na, hey hey, goodbye” thing. I love ladder matches that don’t have custom ladders like WWF matches, but ones that somebody got at a Home Depot with the paint bucket tray sawed off so as to not fuck anybody up unnecessarily. Some belt is up in the air on a wire, I would bet it’s the Wildside Jr. Heavyweight title, but don’t hold me to that. To Wildside’s credit, they do have nice Werner fiberglass ladders. Coleman did a nice springboard off the barricade, which can’t be too strong, onto Rave in the crowd. That’s agile. Usually I wouldn’t say something like this about a wrestler, but Caprice Coleman has a nice smile, the type that you can trust and want to hear him talk some bullshit. Coleman throws Rave onto some chairs in the crowd on the opposite side, then runs and does the springboard thing again, this time head first. I love that. I used to always do that shit onto people when we were drinking, it keeps everybody aware when 210 pounds of longhaired mayhem may do a running senton off the coffee table onto your ass. The best was when I went through the front window at this one house, and they had this guy, Joe, who lived there, who would’ve been a dick about it. Everybody was like, “are you okay?” And I was, I had only gone through a window, it wasn’t like it was a wall or some shit. Somehow it got fixed and I didn’t have anything to do with it and Joe never confronted me about it, so I don’t know. Of course, the same Joe broke my windshield in my Datsun one night while we were at a gas station. I went to pay and came out and it was broke, and he was like, “Damn dude, I swatted a bug.” And I was like, “And broke my windshield? Goddamn, bitch.” I got some dude back home, Tank, to fix it with me, he made me do most of the work, but he was my second father, and I had to help him do shit I didn’t want to help with a few times, but it was cool. Of course, Joe, being a yankee, thought he would be even if he paid me some money. Sometimes money ain’t no good. Jimmy Rave is bleeding right good, like any kid in shiny baggy pants should. Coleman takes a couple fucked-up bumps against the upside down ladder in the corner. We have our first setting up of the ladder. Rave takes a fall. So far, he’s gone up twice and been knocked down twice. Rave looks like a homeless raver kid, leaning against the rail. HAHAHA! Coleman sells the afraid of heights angle, and is going up while Rave is slumped over ringside. About three steps up, Coleman’s legs start shaking real bad, and he tries another step but his legs are too wobbly, and he has to jump down. I’d like to recant my earlier statement about the ladder. It’s not a Werner, it’s a Keller. So fuck Wildside, those cheap bastards. Jimmy Rave is getting fucked-up, and Caprice Coleman is my new favoritest wrestler. Fuck Rusty Riddle. Coleman sets up the ladder again, and gets one step higher before his knees start knocking.

BEER SEVEN: So Caprice waves his buddy in to get the belt for him, he’s halfway up, and some other dude comes from the back and knocks that guy off. Then that guy tries to go up for the belt…wait a second…THAT’S LAZZ! THAT’S LAZZ! THAT’S LAZZ! Well, I drank half my beer while Lazz got beat up ringside. Caprice goes up again, and gets towards the top and hugs the ladder. This afraid of heights in a ladder match is the greatest thing since that Three Stooges where they were sleeping on a mattress under their truck and water flowing down the side of the road swept them away. Jimmy Rave is climbing the ladder awful slow; he’d make a shitty painter. Coleman did a rough-looking stunner off the ladder, which I think might have paralyzed Jimmy Rave. Coleman’s at the top, hugging again, and praying, and Jimmy Rave comes up the other side. Coleman got the belt, but Rave knocked him out and the belt fell ringside. According to the rules laid out by the announcers, whoever picks up the belt first wins. Rave does that. I never knew you had to make it back down the ladder with the belt to win. Usually people just fall down like they ran a marathon. There’s a cage, an old school chain link cage. This already rocks. And it’s a War Games match. Adam Jacobs comes out first, and he’s wearing a black tank top that says “YOUR MOM’S HOT”. I will drink to that, your mom is hot. I saw her on milfhunter last week.

BEER EIGHT: The first face to come out is A.J. Styles, long before the wrestling nerd community’s wet dream of him. KICK HIS ASS ADAM! Jacobs tastes the steel first. And he blades, pulling the sweet razor from his wrist tape. I’d be the worst because I’d always blade too much. I would be Ian Rotten blading in there, just trying to be the best. Wow, Jacobs bumps on his brain, and he’s not really bad at all. But he’s climbing out for some reason. If I had a dollar for every time a wrestling announcer said, “busted wide open.” Jacobs has a slight bloodline over his one eyebrow and he looks like the corny kid from Beverly Hills 90210 who was fucking Aaron Spelling’s daughter and being the DJ and had the wack rap career that I saw him on Soul Train one time when Don Cornelius still hosted, and it was right at the end of Cornelius’ time and he was pretending to care about this shitty white kid on his show, missing the old days when none of the dancers were anything but big booty black queens. Hey, Styles just did a move I haven’t seen him do in all his indy glory lately; he had Jacobs up for like a Razor Ramon finish, but flipped the dude over face first sideways. It was nice. I like shit I ain’t seen. Prince Justice, a smaller Big Show rip-off, comes out to make two-on-one on Styles’ Christian ass. Christianity has come up a lot in this review, I guess because it’s Sunday in a rural area, and I was held up from buying pork chops promptly at the IGA by all the fuckers who just got out of Church when I had just got out of Bed. Now Onyx has hit the ring to make it even. Onyx is the “one man posse”. Jason Cross, Satanic servant, joins the forces of evil in the ring, leaving our heroes seemingly helpless. To add to the problem their fourth partner, David Flair, was not to be involved, as he had just signed a contract with the WWF. I hadn’t noticed a cameraman in the ring before, but there is. Why are all the shots from outside the ring then? In this context, I like Styles. He’s not full of himself and all the adulation of the internet community that says, “Hey, he’s the greatest.” You’d be surprised how much influence that has on a guy’s ego, even if the internet community is like a large multi-legged amoeba, with no defined agenda or direction. Look at Low-Ki. He became an indy sensation with the online fuckers, and now he won’t wrestle matches longer than seven minutes, unless he’s gonna win, and even then, he won’t go much farther than ten minutes unless he gets the rub from somebody like Eddie Guerrero, like he did earlier this year while Guerrero’s WWF license was still suspended for drinking and driving.

BEER NINE: Out comes Air Paris. I have never seen an Air Paris match I didn’t like. He brings a chair in with him and smashed all three bad guys. The cage is taking a beating and getting wobbly at parts. I love that. Air Paris is going high on the cage, but Jason Cross knocks him down. I was a-waiting carnage. A.J. Styles is on top of the cage, clips over, and is up on the top corner, the cage is all bent up where he was. If I seen a dude’s back on fire already…well fuck. A.J. Styles does a sunset flip from the top of the cage, and the dude he did it to was on the top rope. The cage is half fallen apart. John Phoenix makes it four on three for the rudos. The heels take over, and since David Flair ain’t coming out at all, I’m expecting some sort of sudden run-in by some unexpected party, to even things up. And on a level playing field, in a righteous World, the good guys always win. Always, motherfucker. That’s why you should vote independent. Republicans and Democrats are heels, in cahoots with each other and Gary Hart to blow deadly green mist in your eyes when you aren’t expecting it. Adam Jacobs goes to the top of the cage to drop his ass onto nothing. The ol’ Brian Christopher. Did I mention that Jeff G. Bailey is the greatest manager I’ve ever seen in ten years? Stone Mountain is your surprise fourth good guy. Stone Mountain and Prince Justice have similar looks and trunks, so I assume they’re natural enemies. Well, no, Stone Mountain actually went heel. So it’s five on three, which is even worse than the previous odds. I imagine after this that Stone Mountain and Prince Justice made an unbeatable combo the fans hated. And even though the cage is falling apart, nobody is able to make it in to save the fans’ main mans, beat down in the ring. This is great, in a Hawaiian match with Bruiser Brody and The Sheik sort of way.

BEER TEN: Jeff G. Bailey rocks. Wrestling rocks. There is nothing better, and that’s why you’re here to read this shit. I only drank a quarter of that beer, and there’s the RF Honky Tonk Man shoot video after this. I’m gonna pop a painkiller and dig on the Wayne Ferris vibe.